Massimo Motta

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Social & Behavioural Sciences

Massimo Motta (BSc Bocconi, Milan, 1987; PhD Louvain, 1991) is Research Professor at ICREA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and Barcelona GSE. He was Chief Economist at the European Commission in 2013-2016, where he coordinated the EC's economic analysis and advised the Competition Commissioner on antitrust, merger and state aid. He was previously professor at Univ. Bologna (2007-2010), European University Institute, Florence (1998-2008) and UPF (1992-1998). He is Research Fellow of CEPR, of CESifo, and a Fellow of the European Economic Association. His research is on industrial organization and has been published in the top international journals. Massimo's book on Competition Policy: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2004) is the standard reference on antitrust. His new (co-authored) book on Exclusionary Practices (Cambridge) was published in January 2018.

Research interests

Together with C. Fumagalli (Univ. Bocconi, Milan) I have been working on practices - such as predation, rebates, exclusive contracts, tying, refusal to deal - that dominant firms may adopt to exclude rivals from the market. Currently, we are studying how firms which have vertically-related or complementary products may use conduct such as refusal to supply or tying to exclude rivals. Another stream of work (with E Tarantino, at Mannheim Univ.) deals with the effects of mergers on investment and innovation, and on potential competition. Both sets of issues are particularly important in today's digital economies.